THE GURGLING COD

Bluefish and Lemmon

If it were my job to sell bluefish, and he were still alive, I'd  get Jack Lemmon to be my spokesperson. If Lemmon is an actor's actor, bluefish is a fish's fish. Certainly, not a fish for people who do not like fish. For reasons not entirely clear to me, many of the same folks who do not like bluefish are the people who fish for them. By all accounts, they behave like blenders with fins and scales, which makes for exciting sport, but may account for the prejudice against them. I've always been a fan. If you are in the Northeast, they are local, as far as I know, they are in no danger of being overfished, and they taste like something, as opposed to say, tilapia. Also, I don't know how seasonal they are, but blues usually seem to appear in late summer, in the context of real tomatoes and corn on the cob. This past weekend involved important Rockaway birthday activities. Usually, my role at this party is to cook all or part of a mammal, but a grill shortage made that impractical. I'd seen this receipt in the Globe earlier in the week, and thought I'd give it a try.

6  ounces boneless smoked bluefish
8  ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2  medium red onion, finely chopped
4-6  dashes hot sauce
2  tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1  tablespoon lemon juice
1  tablespoon finely chopped parsley
1/4  cup chopped fresh chives (for garnish)
1. Remove and discard the skin and darkest flesh from the bluefish.
2. Flake the fish into medium bowl. Add the cream cheese, onion, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, lemon juice, and parsley. Stir to combine thoroughly. Transfer to a serving bowl, garnish with chives, and serve with toast points or crackers.
-Amanda Lydon and Gabriel Frasca.*

This seemed to be pretty popular. I did not have this receipt in front of me when I was cooking, but this is the basic idea. I did smoke the bluefish myself, and you might as a well, too:  Salt and pepper the filets, put them in a Cameron smoker** with some mostly alder and some cherry chips, and smoke until the smoke subsides, and a bit more. (Ca. 25 minutes over a medium flame.) This is one of those receipts that tastes good at intermediate stages--maybe better than as the finished product -- the cream cheese takes in in a sort of deli-ish direction that is not so consistent with a summer beach context. Next time, I might try binding the fish with a light homemade mayo instead. On the other hand, the limited cracker options at the local grocery led to a very happy triscuitaissance. They were the perfect medium for this stuff, and I'd forgotten how good they were.

*Unfortunately, not Johnny Lydon's daughter, but rather Christopher Lydon's.
**Do not be skeptical. This may look like a NordicTrack for your kitchen, but I've enjoyed everything I've ever made with it.

Take a memo, Stockholm

They may not yet give Nobel Prizes for Google search queries, but that is about to change. Ladies and gentlemen:

smoove sun dress cocktail sauce

Somewhere, Ezra Pound is biting his lip, furtively.  See you in Sweeden, Google-user!

Salt licks

I skipped it when it came out, but the LA Times article on Judy Rodgers and salt from early this month is still in their archives, and still worth a read. A post on Ruhlman charcuterie vs. Grigson charcuterie lead to an lively discussion about the various relationships between cookbook authors and home cooks. Some books make you feel as if you have a partner in the kitchen, while others make you feel like a harassed sous. The first kind of cookbook makes you feel as if you are expanding your own repertoire; the second can make you feel as if you have screwed up someone else's receipt. Judy Rodgers is as exacting as any of the harassers, but she is good enough that you feel as if you have a partner. The LA Times  article offers a solid overview of her approach, and includes the famous roast chicken and bread salad receipt.* Grab it while you can, and you will likely put the whole Zuni book on your wishlist.
*Part of the appeal is hearing someone have a culinary "philosophy" that is more evolved than "serve fresh ingedients."  On the episode of  Kitchen Nightmares  that aired last night, Gordon Ramsay kept repeating this mantra as if it were the theory of special relativity.

Summer Reading

If you are stumped for a house gift, or looking for some edifying reading for yourself, allow me to suggest Spoiled. There is no text to speak of, just photographs of grafittied refrigerators discarded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. If you want to remind yourself, or someone else, that Gulf people's lives are not yet un-torn-apart, or if you enjoy photograpy books that feature many iterations of the same object, or if you want to see the "Free Gumbo Inside" fridge, get this book. As far as I know, the only place to buy it is from the author, and I encourage you to do so. If I were mayor of the universe, Spoiled,  rather than Sirio's bography, would be for sale in the foyer of Le Cirque.

Budget Swap

If the ubiquitous KitchenAid stand mixer is the Star Splurge, then this device is surely the budget swap. And speaking of US Magazine, I'd love to hear what one of their body language experts would say about the posture of the test pilot: she seems resigned to losing that arm, but secure in the knowledge that her hair is fabulous.

Best of all, this is the kind of labor-saving device that not only demands that you bring all of your food out  to the driveway, but also requires that you jack up the rear end of a car. Also, bear in mind, 1) this device will only work if you have an even number of bolts securing your wheel to the axle, and 2) if you try this with an all wheel drive vehicle, you will experience a nasty surprise. I'd be in an even better position to make fun of this had I not recently entertained the similar idea of figuring out an adaptor that would enable a Kitchen-Aid stand mixer to drive a standard cast-iron meat grinder, rather than their somewhat rinky-dink grinder attachment.  Modern Mechanix, via Make.

The 70% Solution

Don't call it a comeback. Actually, it is. Tod Murphy, of Farmers Diner fame, is opening Farmers Diner 2.0 this August. Latest details are in yesterday's Valley News, which does not have this article on line, but the gist is in this earlier story. Farmers Diner, as you may recall, garnered a lot of buzz in its initial iteration as a diner in downtown Barre, VT, that served all local produce. (They were pretty serious about their 70-mile radius--I know that they opted not to work with an upstate NY vendor on food-mile grounds.) Last summer, they closed. Now, rather than a diner in a town best known for a quarry, Farmers Diner is a 125 seat venue with a liquor license at an Quechee Gorge Village, an "Antique Mall" on a busy tourist strip, and the all-local requirement has been scaled back to 70% of every food dollar. I wish this venture well. If the leaf-peepers learn something about local and sustainable between rounds of mini-golf and visits to the Antique Mall, good. It would be churlish of me to recall that when I was small, the site of Quechee Gorge Village was an, um, cornfield.

Mackey and Pollan Out of Sight

In case you missed it, Joe Nocera managed to sneak a mash note to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey into Saturday's Times. In Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan had some bad things to say about the industrialization of organic food in general, and Whole Foods in particular. Mackey responded with an open letter to Pollan, Pollan responded in kind, and the whole thing rendered Harding v. Kerrigan levels of buzz, at least in the world of people who agonize about the future of organic foods. Nocera's take "A_Tussle, of Sorts, over Organics ," is a remarkable document:

Like most people in my demographic group, I greatly enjoy shopping at Whole Foods. But until I'd read the exchange, I'd never really thought much about organic food as a business. After a little investigation, though, I think I now understand why Whole Foods is such an appealing store for so many people -- and why it's so important for Mr. Mackey to have his company viewed as one of the good guys.

<snip>

Last year, in an article in Reason magazine, Mr. Mackey argued that making customers happy was far more important than maximizing profits. He also added a far more radical note: he believed in a form of capitalism, he said, ''that more consciously works for the common good instead of depending solely on the 'invisible hand' to generate positive results for society.'' A values-driven capitalism, in other words.

To  his credit, Nocera identifies that the key to Whole Foods is making its customers feel good about themselves, but the difference between righteous marketing and marketing righteousness seems to elude him:

''The appeal of Whole Foods is that it is a place where food is celebrated, food is romanced, food is presented in a fashion that is in opposition to how it is sold in the vast majority of supermarkets,'' said Bill Bishop, the president of Willard Bishop Consulting, a food retail consultant. Organic goods are a crucial component of that ''differentiation,'' he added, because the very term has acquired a kind of magical aura -- a halo effect, in which the customer feels virtuous just by walking into the store.

Not surprisingly, the  tussle has a happy ending:

 

Which brings me back to Mr. Mackey's exchange with Mr. Pollan. Mr. Pollan responded to Mr. Mackey's open letter with a post of his own, in which he stressed that the company had largely turned its back on local organic farmers. Mr. Mackey, in turn, wrote another lengthy open letter, in which he defended the company's record in dealing with local farmers -- but he also vowed to do better.

And sure enough, he has. The company is now allowing its store managers to do business directly with more local farmers, and is also putting aside $10 million, which will be used to make small loans to local farmers. Will it be more expensive to work directly with farmers instead of routing everything through the regional distribution center? Of course it will.

But for Whole Foods, no money will ever be better spent.

As tussles go, this reminds me of the scene in Out of Sight where a still-credible Jennifer Lopez subdues a frisky Isiah Washington with a collapsable baton, saying "You wanted to tussle. We just tussled." Using this many column inches in America's paper of record to equate the health of the environment with the health of Whole Foods' business model calls for a gift basket, at the very least.

I can no longer shop (adverb tk)

Metro: Members are fleeing the Park Slope Food Co-op for Twinkies, parking, and ideology-free shopping at the new Fairway in Red Hook. (TFS)

Ok, I an see how a new generation of Slopers might get tired of  cashiers who refuse to touch their meat, but on what planet is "the New Fairway in Red Hook" possibly "ideology-free"? Answer: not this one.
 

First they came for the foie gras

We have the answer all of the "what next" gumflapping in the wake of local foie gras bans, and WF's new lobster policy, viz:

What’s next, no oysters? No sir—they’re alive! No more salmon roe—think of all those unborn salmon you're smearing on your toast and dotting on your blini! All the good salmon deeds that will remain undone! All that emotional life of the unborn chickens! Gone! Delicately poached and nestled on frissée!*

What's next? Now, the killjoys  have declared a fatwa on mouth-shaped urinals. At a McDonalds. In Holland no less.

 

AMSTERDAM

Netherlands — A McDonald's fast-food outlet in the south east of the Netherlands has agreed to remove urinals that are shaped like wide-open red lips.  The decision was taken after a shocked American customer complained to the McDonald's head office in the US.
Owner Giel Pijper said on Wednesday that the bright red, mouth-shaped urinals, named 'Kisses',  are works of art. But a different view is taken of them in  America. The urinals are being removed and will be sold off. "I'm not going to harp on about a pair of urinals," he said.

They are the work of Dutch woman Meike van Schijndel.  She is the designer at the Utrecht-based firm Bathroom Mania! Speaking to Expatica in 2004, she said the urinals were designed as a fun cartoon mouth and not as a woman's mouth.

She stressed that the idea her urinals represented a man peeing into a woman's mouth never occurred to her, nor to many men and women she had spoken to. Her company was inundated with orders after the Virgin Airlines controversy, Van Schijndel said.

Best of all, the caption for the picture above read as follows: "Degrading to women or toilet cartoon fun?" Why does it always have to be one or the other? I am not a ceramicist, but perhaps an alternative that would smooth ruffled feathers would be urinals shaped like geese with gavage funnels in place. Just trying to help.  (Thanks to the keen-eyed  Slobra for the tip.)

*As recently as 2003, Ruhlman was writing, some say quite well, about heart surgeons. Explanations for the Maddenization of Ruhlman are welcome.

Allow me to propose a Toast

The Hav’s rules for writers of food memoirs hits it right on the button:

Europe is the source of authenticity; Culture comes from over there. You can't skip it if you're going to make food your living. Ideally the writer gains familiarity both with the provincial pleasures of local meats and cheeses and with the fancy metropolitan restaurant world.

Having waded through many of the same books, this list captures how pervasive the conventions of this genre can be. On the positive side, these tendencies make reading a book that defies them a rare treat. Nigel Slater’s Toast is such a memoir. I picked it up off the remainder table, as a stopgap after being unable to bring myself to pay sticker price for one of the summer’s summer food blockbusters. I recognized Slater’s name as one of those English food guys who was neither Gordon Ramsay nor Jamie Oliver, and had read some of his stuff in the Observer, but did not know much more about him.

    Toast simultaneously manages to be much sadder and much sexier than most food memoirs. For one thing, penises appear constantly, (uncooked) sometimes with sad results, and sometimes with sexy results. In the US edition, there is a glossary in the back for things like Marmite, but for this American reader, the thing that needed glossing was the fundamental meanness of English life in the years of Slater’s childhood. As he describes his family, they sound poor, until you realize that Slater’s father runs a factory, and they have a gardener and a maid. If you imagine a hybrid of the grimmer parts of Roald Dahl and the squishier precincts of the Ian McEwan oeuvre, you are in the right ballpark, or pitch, I guess.
    Heretically for a food memoir, there are no receipts. Instead, each of the brief vignettes is framed by the memory of specific foodstuff. It would be easy to write a book like this and fall into the madeline trap, but Slater knows he is not, in fact, Proust, and refuses to lapse into the “the smell of x magically transports me to y, in year z.” 
    By skipping the receipts, food becomes the context for the story, rather than the tail that wags the dog. Slater's mom can't cook much better than the Reichl mom we meet in Comfort me with Apples, but the vignettes detailing her decline and death are all the more moving for their refusal to collapse Mom into pies and cookies.
The larger structure is a bildungsroman. Slater escapes a difficult father and a coarse, if not actively wicked stepmother, snogging with girls and then with boys, and starting to cook professionally. He closes the narrative with the paradigmatic arrival in the Big City, but pulls the plug before he has to describe his inevitable success.
    For American readers, who can pick the book up for the price of a fancy coffee drink, two remarkable aspects of the English you will learn from this book are their obsessions with a) class and b) candy. Indeed, the two intersect, as Slater indicates again and again that the range of candy you can consume is determined by your identity.  In any event, if you are weary of the of the increasingly oafish food lads, Toast is a humble and humane palate-cleanser.